America's 1st war for independence
Doug Phillips By Doug Phillips
Published June 8, 2007
Exactly 100 years before the members of the 2nd Continental Congress pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the cause of freedom, Jamestown became the location of America's first true war for independence.
The year was 1676, and the key players were an impatient and heavy-handed governor named Sir William Berkeley, and the charismatic legislator and populist, Nathaniel Bacon.
The question was this: What are citizens supposed to do when their wives and children are being murdered and scalped on a regular basis, and the civil magistrate (in this case, the governor) not only refuses to defend them, but actually prohibits the citizenry from taking up arms in defense of their own family members?
There were other issues, too. The colonists of Jamestown and beyond did not care for the governor's excessive taxation, incompetence or corruption. But the tipping point was Berkeley's perceived war against women and children.
Berkeley was a true royalist. He hated the independent spirit of the frontiersmen. And he disapproved of anything that smacked of republicanism or Cromwellian Protestantism. To teach them a lesson in submission, he repeatedly denied their petitions to raise up armies in defense of their homes. He even denied them the right to defend themselves.
Bacon, on the other hand, was a gentleman-turned-man-of-the-people who was elected to the House of Burgesses. When, after numerous petitions and appeals, the governor refused to act properly, Bacon concluded that he had to take action. His appeal was to the higher law of God and the rights of Englishmen under the Magna Charta, but his argument was rooted in the "doctrine of interposition."
In sum, the idea behind "interposition" was this: No magistrate is above the law of God. Civil magistrates operate as men under authority. A lower official has a duty to hold a higher official accountable when the higher official breaks the law of God and the land.
Of this doctrine, Black's Law Dictionary states:
Implementation of the doctrine may be peaceable, as by resolution, remonstrance or legislation, or may proceed ultimately to nullification with forcible resistance.
And this doctrine was not new to Bacon.
It had been established on the field of Runnymede in 1215 with King John; Reformers like John Calvin and Samuel Rutherford had invoked the doctrine; and Scots like Malcolm Wallace, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce adopted the principle in their battle against English rule.
For example, when Robert the Bruce gathered the Parliament of Scotland in 1320, they drafted and adopted the Declaration of Arbroath. This interpositionary document set forth their history as a free people until the usurpation of King Edward of England, and declared that:
... for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we under any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.
As legal historian John Eidsmoe has observed:
Scottish history and thought have greatly influenced America, especially Alabama where our state flag bears the St. Andrew's Cross. When the Scots again fought for independence in the 1740s under Bonnie Prince Charles and were brutally suppressed, thousands of them fled to America. … the next generation of Scottish-Americans became leaders in the American War for Independence. The Mecklenburg Declaration, drafted in 1775 by a group of Scottish Presbyterian elders in North Carolina, bears striking parallels to the Declaration of Independence.
Nathaniel Bacon would mount an army and enjoy enormous success against the tyrannical Gov. Berkeley. But in the end, Bacon died before complete victory was realized, leaving his war effort substantially diminished. Ultimately, Berkeley rounded up the conspirators and conducted numerous executions until he was told by the Crown to cease and desist.
Looking back on Bacon's Rebellion, several key strategic and ethical mistakes are observable in America's first great war of independence. It is a matter of no small regret, for example, that during the war Bacon felt it necessary to burn the Capitol at Jamestown to the ground, thus depriving future generations of the landmarks to their early liberty.
This beings said, it was because of Bacon that key reforms became part of the political, legal and cultural vocabulary of the American people. Not the least of these reforms was the broad recognition of the right of the citizenry to keep and bear arms, a principle enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Like the Founding Fathers of another generation, Bacon fought for the right of the common man to maintain weapons, not merely for protection against marauding Indians, but despotic regimes.
More importantly, Bacon's defense of liberty would set the stage for the greatest act of legal interposition in the history of the West – the American War of Independence. And no document in history has done more to present the case for lawful interposition than the Declaration of Independence, which outlines many of the same Reformation-oriented arguments presented by the Republican dissenters of 1676 – namely, that a lower magistrate may hold a renegade and tyrannical higher magistrate accountable to the "laws of nature and of natures God."
But you probably did not read about this in government school.
You did not, because long ago our teaching establishments exchanged the Christian principles of liberty under higher law for a mess of pottage called statism.
That is why in 2003 some Americans did not know how to react to Chief Justice Roy Moore, the great modern-day hero of the doctrine of interposition.
When confronted with an unlawful order in violation of state and federal constitutional law, the very "laws of nature and of nature's God" and the revealed higher law, this courageous magistrate interposed on behalf of the people to prevent tyrants from removing a monument to the law of God from the public square.
Like Bacon, he was not received well by statists who would define "the rule of law" as anything they say it is. Also like Bacon, he would succeed in inspiring a generation to take courageous stands in defense of fundamentals.
The principle of freedom under God's law will be represented once again near Jamestown. On June 15 – one week from today – a monument to liberty under the higher law will be placed on the banks of the same river where Bacon used his office to interpose in defense of women and children. (Notably, this monument was crafted by the same company that built the Alabama Ten Commandments Monument.)
Nearly 4,000 individuals from most of the 50 states will gather for the laying of the Jamestown Children's Memorial. Paid for by the one-dollar donation of thousands of children, this monument not only invokes the Fifth Commandment, but reminds future generations that they must know the stories of the hand of God in the lives of their heroic fathers.
One of these fathers was Nathaniel Bacon, a legislator and citizen of Jamestown whose campaign against tyranny and in defense of women and children paved the way for the visionaries of 1776.
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